<p>apparently on his resume he claimed to be fluent in French, Old English, Old Persian, and Classical Armenian. How did he come up with that lol?</p>
<p>Pretty safe–no one else speaks those. There is a link to that resume on the other thread.</p>
<p>MDmom, what do you mean by “work the system?”</p>
<p>^ Yeah, an earlier poster remarked that it was sad that people get spots that other people who “actually worked hard” deserve. Am I the only one who thinks this is pretty funny, in a scary way? These Ivy League faculty are supposed to be the best and brightest, and people are able to commit fraud like this? Guess that shows the value of an Ivy education. I, for one, would like to give props to the people who managed to pull that off. From the visiting room of the jail, of course. ;)</p>
<p>I mean, let’s be real here. He really didn’t pull it off.</p>
<p>The real applause should go to the people we don’t know about.</p>
<p>Wow. That’s some audacity.</p>
<p>Would someone be thrown out and charged with a crime if they DIDN’T apply for scholarships? What if it was really minor, like exaggerating community service hours or claiming to be a URM? I’m pretty a lot of people do these things.</p>
<p>Judging from what I’ve seen, he’s a sociopath, a very smart one at that. He went to Bowdoin before this whole fiasco so I’m guessing he’s not an idiot. You’ve gotta be pretty smart to pull of something like this. I wonder what his ultimate goal was?</p>
<p>^^^ Smart enough to have been admitted to Bowdoin, but unbelievably stupid if he even thought for a moment that the resume he submitted to The New Republic would not be seen as fake.
<a href=“http://www.tnr.com/blogs/jonathan-chait[/url]”>http://www.tnr.com/blogs/jonathan-chait</a></p>
<p>vdoodler–By “work the system” I mean that some people package themselves to look a certain way. It is not necessarily bad or uncommon, and it is probably good to do some research of some kind to try to figure out what a school is looking for.</p>
<p>You don’t have to read very many posts on this site to see what I mean. Every day, someone posts something about what EC would look better on an application. Those who are “working the system” are participating in ECs and taking classes with the purpose of looking good on an application rather than with the purpose of learning something or doing something they love.</p>
<p>
What an utterly despicable reaction. I’m disgusted.</p>
<p>He’s from Delaware. Maybe he should wait a few years and run for the Senate.</p>
<p>It makes you wonder though - have there been people like this who have actually managed to get away with it?</p>
<p>There are also some good comments on this topic in The New York Times’ “The Choice” ([Lingering</a> Questions Over Deception at Harvard - The Choice Blog - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/harvard-3/]Lingering”>Lingering Questions Over Deception at Harvard - The New York Times)). I unleashed my own rant there (#32), never wanting to miss an opportunity to publicly indict the current admissions process in general. ;)</p>
<p>Sally, with all due respect, a lot of people think that College Confidential makes a living off of the very process that you “rant” about in your post.</p>
<p>What is the point of faking transcripts to get into school? If he was going to go through all that trouble anyway, why not just fake the degree and be done with it?</p>
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<p>You will often find me to be the first to complain about the college process as it exists now, and when I am asked (as I often am) how it irks me, I always begin with “Let me count the ways …”</p>
<p>I have a 13-year-old son who will face this fray before long, and I used to hope (and even assume) that by the time he reached his high school years, this would be a more sensible undertaking … but, instead, it only seems to be getting worse.</p>
<p>I would be delighted to see huge changes in the admissions process, but I don’t think that such changes would put CC entirely out of business. Even a saner admissions world would not preclude folks from wondering, “What are the pros and cons of accelerated medical programs?” or “How do divorced parents fill out the FAFSA?”</p>
<p>But I’d love to see students be able to stop asking questions like, “If I take AP Psychology instead of AP Physics, could it hurt my chances at Princeton?” or “How many hours of community service will look good on my application to Duke?”</p>
<p>Why exactly does the process need to be reformed?</p>
<p>Just because kids go crazy over the smallest details doesn’t mean the smallest details actually matter.</p>
<p>It just makes me wonder how many of the applications to the ivies have fabricated eliments to them especially in the EC and reccomendation areas but also in terms financial need.</p>
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<p>Second that, regarding both the post it refers to and the situation we’re discussing.</p>
<p>@drdom: It’s possible and likely that applicants exaggerate their ECs, but I would think that it’s not easy to have fabricated recommendation letters or exaggerated financial need. You need to send in W2 forms and the tax returns to verify the information you have provided in the FAFSA, which makes it too complicated to tackle for the majority of the population, and besides, financial need does not even directly factor into admission in schools that are need blind.</p>
<p>Sally, I hear you. But CC detractors will say that it’s disingenous for CC to maintain that it brings “sanity” to the admissions process when in fact CC is probably the single biggest draw on the web for hyper obsessed students and parents who whip each other into a frenzy over that same process!</p>